A ‘world without Islam’ would still be a colonial target

Book review of Graham E. Fuller’s ‘A World Without Islam’ (Little, Brown, and Company, N.Y. 2010). A title for a book is frequently the set of few words that creates a significant first impression and attracts the purchasers’/readers’ eye in to give more consideration to the work. Fuller’s “A World Without Islam” is an intriguingly successful work, relying in part on an initial attraction to the word Islam, and then to the connotation of a world without Islam. My first thought was that it might be an ill-considered argument by some right wing media pundit looking for their position in the spotlight by denouncing Islam and how good the world would be without it. It was that reaction prompting my extraction of the work from among the dozens on the bookshelf, hoping to find something that I could delve into and find out what kind of arrogant arguments could be made to support that supposition.